Once upon a time ... some quite-a-few years ago ... an uninvited guest knocked on my door ..
https://kurtofgerolstein.blogspot.com/2010/01/peacocks-on-my-patio.html
He was novel, he was cute, he was friendly
We fed him. We didn't want him to go away. But he did. Mating season, he went in search of sex. But a few months later he came back!
How to keep him here? Answer: import him a harem. We did. Three hens from Little River.
https://kurtofgerolstein.blogspot.com/2011/08/to-catch-peacock.html
Wrong.
Within a few years we were overflowing with peafowl. They don't know what Oedipal and Incestual and Miscegenation mean.
See previous blogs for pictures of cute chicks, and teeming fowl .. I think that, after a few years, there were up to 40 or 50 of the big birds on our wee farm. Squawking and Fighting and omigod SHITTING everywhere.
It's a long tale, but, bit by bit, we divested ourselves of the peastock. The fighting cocks and the squabbling sorority
Nigel, the peacock catcher, rugby tackled the noisest cocks and carried them off to eager places where peacocks were a novelty
To cut a long story slightly shorter, a few years back, after much avian exporting, we ended up with, only, for 'housepets', the paterfamilias, one son (Alberich), and three girls of known lineage (Wellgunde, Woglinde, Flosshilde) if not of precise parenthood.
Still too much. So Alberich and Flosshilde were sent off to someone in the North Island and we, finally, got the Gerolsteiner stock back to manageable proportions. Mr P (less rampant than before) was satisfied with a harem of two, and we have all lived happily together .. except when they dig up my plants! .. until ...
Today.
Peafowl are supposed to live forty years or so. So we thought that this agreeable threesome was our ornithological family for life. But we noticed, a few weeks ago, that Wellgunde was looking strange. Droopy wings. Last night she was not in her tree. Mr P and Woglinde seem to know ..
All alone, I'm just all alone |
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